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down a flight of rocks in
Central Park.
But the memory-burst didn't blow up my mind, as it had done a year ago, no
more than snapping the black thread from my sweater had ended the world. I
asked Martin, "Is that what the Snakes say?"
"Of course not! They make the same claims we do. But somewhere, Greta, you
have to trust
." He put out the middle finger of his hand.
I didn't take hold of it. He whirled it away, snapping it against his thumb.
"You're still grieving for that carrion there!" he accused me. He jerked down
a section of white curtain and whirled it [192]over the stiffening body. "If
you must grieve, grieve for Miss Nefer! Exiled, imprisoned, locked forever in
the past, her mind pulsing faintly in the black hole of the dead and gone,
yearning for Nirvana yet nursing one lone painful patch of consciousness. And
only to hold a fort! Only to
make sure Mary Stuart is executed, the Armada licked, and that all the other
consequences flow on. The
Snakes' Elizabeth let Mary live ... and England die ... and the Spaniard hold
North America to the Great
Lakes and New Scandinavia."
Once more he put out his middle finger.
"All right, all right," I said, barely touching it. "You've convinced me."
"Great!" he said. "'By for now, Greta. I got to help strike the set."
"That's good," I said. He loped out.
I could hear the skirling sword-clashes of the final fight to the death of the
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two Macks, Duff and Beth.
But I only sat there in the empty dressing room pretending to grieve for a
devil-smiling snow tiger locked in a time-cage and for a cute sardonic German
killed for insubordination that had reported ... but really
I
grieving for a girl who for a year had been a rootless child of the theater
with a whole company of mothers and fathers, afraid of nothing more than
subway bogies and Park and Village monsters.
As I sat there pitying myself beside a shrouded queen, a shadow fell across my
knees. I saw stealing through the dressing room a young man in worn dark
clothes. He couldn't have been more than twenty-three. He was a frail sort of
guy with a weak chin and big forehead and eyes that saw everything.
I knew at one he was the one who had seemed familiar to me in the knot of City
fellows.
He looked at me and I looked from him to the picture sitting on the reserve
makeup box by Siddy's mirror. And I began to tremble.
He looked at it too, of course, as fast as I did. And then he began to tremble
too, though it was a finer-grained tremor than mine.
The sword-fight had ended seconds back and now I heard the witches faintly
wailing, "Fair is foul, and foul is fair " Sid has them echo that line
offstage at the end to give a feeling of prophecy fulfilled.
Then Sid came pounding up. He's the first finished, since the fight ends
offstage so Macduff can carry back a red-necked papier-mache head of him and
[193]show it to the audience. Sid stopped dead in the door.
Then the stranger turned around. His shoulders jerked as he saw Sid. He moved
toward him just two or three steps at a time, speaking at the same time in
breathy little rushes.
Sid stood there and watched him. When the other actors came boiling up behind
him, he put his hands on the doorframe to either side so none of them could
get past. Their faces peered around him.
And all this while the stranger was saying, "What may this mean? Can such
things be? Are all the seeds of time ... wetted by some hell-trickle ...
sprouted at once in their granary? Speak ... speak! You played me a play ...
that I am writing in my secretest heart. Have you disjointed the frame of
things ... to steal my unborn thoughts? Fair is foul indeed. Is all the world
a stage? Speak, I say! Are you not my friend Sidney
James Lessingham of King's Lynn ... singed by time's fiery wand ... sifted
over with the ashes of thirty
years? Speak, are you not he? Oh, there are more things in heaven and earth
... aye, and perchance hell too ... Speak, I charge you!"
And with that he put his hands on Sid's shoulders, half to shake him, I think,
but half to keep from falling over. And for the one time I ever saw it, glib
old Siddy had nothing to say.
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